LA PAZ, BOLIVIA — President Evo Morales appeared to have won a sweeping victory Sunday in a nationwide recall election that the leftist chief of state crafted as a means of consolidating support against fierce conservative opposition.
Partial unofficial results based on quick counts at polling places indicated that between 56% and 63% of voters cast ballots in favor of Morales and Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, according to local television stations.
Those totals easily exceeded the 46.3% that the president needed to stay in office. The reported vote also surpassed the 53.7% that the president garnered when elected in December 2005.
Supporters had plastered graffiti throughout the capital seeking a pro-Morales vote of 60%, a decisive margin that would give new impetus for the president's controversial socialist agenda of nationalizations, land redistribution and a new constitution.
Late Sunday, Morales claimed victory in front of ecstatic crowds in the Plaza Murillo in downtown La Paz.
"Today, Bolivia fights for its dignity," declared Morales, who also called for reconciliation with his opponents.
Morales, Bolivia's first Indian president, is slightly more than halfway through his five-year term. Voting trends Sunday confirmed his unwavering appeal among the western highland Indian masses who have long been the base of his support.
The opposition has bitterly accused Morales of favoring the highland multitudes at the expense of the middle class.
Preliminary results also indicated that two opposition prefects, or governors -- Manfred Reyes Villa in the central state of Cochabamba and Jose Luis Paredes in La Paz -- were ousted. Their defeats would add to Morales' apparent triumph. Under Bolivian law, once the results are officially ratified the president will name interim governors to replace those voted out.
However, a defiant Reyes Villa told a news conference in Cochabamba that he had no intention of stepping down, and he labeled Sunday's vote illegal and fraudulent.
"I continue to be the prefect of Cochabamba," he declared.
The governor alleged illegal padding of the voting rolls in Cochabamba. The state is home to the rural coca-growing zone known as the Chapare, where Morales leaped to national prominence as head of the union representing cultivators of the coca leaf, the raw ingredient in cocaine.
"I would not be celebrating if I were him," Reyes Villa said of the president. "The country continues to fracture."
